I read an interview with a Japanese freestyle jazz musician once, and he said something like, "Everything I'm going to tell you is not going to be tr….

Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work..

If I'm in LA, I'm close to home, and that just brings up all these other things, good and bad. There is a reason why I am not there. That's what I ha….

There's this line between propriety and how we really speak and how we really think. And I'm just trying to have fun with that stuff..

Like when you have the right title for something you're writing and you get lost - you can always go back to the title and go, "Yeah, that's what thi….

My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, "Contradiction is how we operate.".

My dad fought in Korea. It was one of the first stories I remember hearing about..

The Sellout is about friends and relatives who have touched me in real ways..

I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure ..

It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think..

I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything..

I remember going to see Amiri Baraka. It wasn't actually too long before he died. He said, "You've got to write to change the world!" I was like, "No….

Sometimes I would get frustrated, I'd think, "You know, this is a good book, how come no one is paying attention to it?" So it's nice to have some re….

It's so hard to say what you really mean. For any number of reasons: to protect yourself, or if you just can't find the words..

There are many similarities between Germans and blacks. The nouns themselves are loaded with so much historical baggage it's impossible for anyone to….

In White Boy Shuffle, I combined my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Takemoto, who really saved me - I don't think I've ever told anyone this - and my firs….

I talk about folding it in often with Althea, my girlfriend. She's getting her doctoral degree at Berkeley and she talks about how even when writing ….

I've also never written anything really in LA..

There are things I don't like, like sitting at the head of the class. It makes me uncomfortable. I'll do it in a seminar if I have to, but with a wor….

I had a student once come up to me and we were talking about this incident, and, of course, I never had the right thing to say. But later on, I reali….

In The Sellout I tried to capture how we can talk and see race, how we see urbanity, and how we see our history..